Let Obama Take His Time on Afghanistan

Can Americans do strategy?

The question is particularly relevant these days as President Obama hosts a series of much-watched White House meetings with his national security team to craft a strategy for U.S. policy regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan (or "AfPak," as Washington policy wonks say). In recent days, Republicans have started griping that Obama is lollygagging as he tries to sort out all the complexities and reach a decision about troop levels and related matters. Sen. John McCain has been pushing Obama for a quick decision to send in more soldiers, as requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. Some hawkish Democrats have also urged Obama to get off the fence and expand the war there. And during recent White House press briefings, reporters have peppered spokesman Robert Gibbs with different variants of this question: What's taking Obama so long? Their queries -- why does he need sooooo many meetings? -- make it seem that the commander in chief is dithering.

But getting this strategy right is a tough task. And a recent report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think thank that focuses on military matters, notes that developing strategy has not been a strength of the U.S. government. The paper begins with a rather blunt statement:

The ability of the U.S. national security establishment to craft, implement, and adapt effective long-term strategies against intelligent adversaries at acceptable costs has been declining for some decades.

Ouch! Sure, these think-tankers concede that the United States took some steps -- such as supporting the Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviets in the 1980s -- that contributed to the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. Still, they say, "the overall trend in the strategic performance of American political and military elites appears to be one of decline." And figuring out how to develop strategy, they point out, is especially important this century, as the United States contends with Islamic radicalism (see Afghanistan), the continuing rise of China, and a world with additional nuclear-armed regional powers.

So what's gone wrong with strategy-making in Washington? The report notes, "U.S. political and military leaders have been increasingly inclined to equate strategy with listing desirable goals, as opposed to figuring out how to achieve them." As in here's our strategy: defeat the Taliban and destroy al-Qaida. That's more of a wish list. The center explains, "As a practical matter, strategy is about making insightful choices of courses of action likely to achieve one's ultimate goals despite resource constraints, political considerations, bureaucratic resistance, the adversary's opposing efforts, and the intractable uncertainties as to how a chosen strategy may ultimately work out."

No wonder it's taking Obama some time. Crafting strategy, the report says, is damn hard and not many people are up to the task:

Not enough people in this country with the candlepower to think strategically about the most fundamental threats to the nation? That's a downer. But maybe there's a bit of light at the end of this tunnel. The report notes,


Isn't that precisely what Obama is doing -- and what some R's and D's are decrying? The report cites Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower as two wartime presidents who took strategy seriously. Eisenhower even once said, "The basic principles of strategy are so simple that a child may understand them. But to determine their proper application to a given situation requires the hardest kind of work."

Democratic and Republican politicians -- and pundits -- pressing Obama to render a decision now ought to back off. Obama is merely following the advice of these strategy experts: investing time and energy. (If only George W. Bush had done the same with Iraq or Afghanistan.) Of course, there's no guarantee that devoting plenty of time and mental sweat to this process will yield decisions that lead to a winning strategy. But it probably does improve the odds for a positive outcome in Afghanistan -- as long as those odds may be.

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